I just finished reading Wooden: A Lifetime of Observations and Reflections On and Off the Court. His coaching tells more how to live sustainably as individuals and a culture than anything else I remember reading or hearing. For those who don’t know, from Wikipedia: John Wooden (1910 – 2010) was an American basketball coach and player. He won ten NCAA national championships in a 12-year period as head coach for[…] Keep reading →

Major cultural touchstones and motivators for many people to growing material production, sales, and population are the words “be fruitful and multiply” and “have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over every living thing that moveth upon the earth.” People nearly universally misunderstand both parts. You can be fruitful by living a sweet life and you can multiply by multiplying happiness.[…] Keep reading →

You’ve probably read things like Until the last century, people were at more risk from malnutrition or starvation than they were from obesity. This lopsided pressure may have shaped humans to be more prone to store fat than to lose it. The ability to store extra calories as fat during times of plenty could help someone stay healthy and fertile when food was scarce. I’m no anthropologist, but I’ve concluded[…] Keep reading →

If you believe that nonstop growth of the economy and population is impossible on a finite planet, you expect that either we have to stop growing deliberately or nature will cause both to collapse. If you further believe we have have overshot what Earth can sustain, you expect that even if we stop now, nature will cause both to collapse. Growing onto other planets doesn’t help because even if we[…] Keep reading →

People who suggest individual action doesn’t matter on the scale we need to restore Earth’s ability to sustain life don’t know what they’re talking about. I don’t mean that figuratively. What they’re saying is like telling someone there’s no point in playing scales on the piano to reach Carnegie Hall when no one goes there to see someone play scales and that, besides, you’ll just have to practice more anyway.[…] Keep reading →

People who suggest individual action doesn’t matter on the scale we need to restore Earth’s ability to sustain life don’t know what they’re talking about. I don’t mean that figuratively. What they’re saying is like telling someone there’s no point in changing their baby’s diaper when it won’t solve infant mortality and that, besides, the baby will need its next diaper changed too. We change our baby’s diapers to help[…] Keep reading →

I see a strong sentiment, especially among youth, of capitalism being the source of our environmental problems. I’m not sure if everyone agrees on what capitalism means. On the scale of the myriad ways thousands of human cultures have lived over hundreds of thousands of years, communism and socialism are pretty close to capitalism, compared to say, how hunting and gathering societies lived. I think most Americans can’t imagine an[…] Keep reading →

Why do so many people lecture me on what it’s like to be a straight white male, and why is what they say invariably unlike my life? Do they tell other people what they should be like due to their sexuality, skin color, and sex? Why do they presume to know so much about me and what motivates them to tell me about my life? Why do they tell me[…] Keep reading →

It’s nice to think of how lovely flying and plastic are, so convenient and amazing, especially if you ignore the parts you don’t like. Both are recent inventions, along with countless others. Humans lived without them for hundreds of thousands of years. Why didn’t people develop them before? Because they weren’t smart enough? No, our ancestors’ brains a few hundred thousand years ago were like ours. We wouldn’t have them[…] Keep reading →